Promotion

The Black Hole gains remake

It's funny, I just posted the trailer for The Black Hole last month, excited to reminisce about the film and what it meant to me when I saw it, and then I said that it was ripe for a remake, and that the story is one that really could benefit from being updated and adapted.

So here we are as the news arrives that Joseph Kosinski, who is currently responsible for Tron Legacy, is going to be the man to take up the helm on the film and bring us the new Black Hole and bring to life the most expensive film Disney had ever made…in 1979 that was.

The Black Hole came in at US $26 million to make at the time and I remember being blown away by it, not just by some of the effects but by the story and some of the characters, the robots in particular. Amongst the Disney story was a surprisingly adult and intelligent one, and I think that was another aspect that drew me into it.

The Black Hole tells the story of the research space vessel USS Palomino investigating a Black Hole in space, and while they're looking from afar they see that much, much closer, close to the point of no return than is deemed safe, is a ship, a lost ship called the USS Cygnus.

They venture towards the ship and discover that aboard it, the sole human survivor Dr. Hans Reinhardt, has built an anti-gravity shield that holds them in place, and the mysteriously missing crew may not be that far away.

Here's a trailer from the original to remind you of the film:

Now we hear from The Hollywood Reporter through First Showing that Joseph Kosinski is set to bring us a new version of the story and that apparently this will be one of those re-words to cover up the fact that it's a remake and Hollywood has tarnished that name far too much to get away with it these days.

Interestingly I'm unsure how they can achieve anything other than a remake since the original is not adapted from anything itself other than the story and script that the writers came up with. No matter, the remake does promise some interesting aspects to the story, more grounding around the science of the Black Hole, and the robot Maximilian will return.

Yeah, I don't really see those as the two big features that would draw me to a remake of the film. As I said before the main thing they could exploit from this story is the fact that it never really covered what happened through the Black Hole, it was merely hinted at, and there's a big black hole there already.

If we're talking robots, the most attractive aspect was Old Bob and Vincent, sure Maximilian was cool, but his character was as paper thin as modern Hollywood leading characters. Mind you they could expand on the surprise of what it actually is, but still, it was the relationship between the old and new versions of the same robot that were the strong part of the robot plots.

Let's see how it turns out though as Travis Beacham is the man set to write the script, he's the man who has just been working on the Clash of the Titans screenplay, and with Joseph Kosinski set to direct we could be looking at a strong film with a big budget and some wonderful effects.